The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood

By Elaine Freedgood

While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with issues, the protocols for studying it have lengthy enjoined readers to not interpret such a lot of what crowds its pages. The rules in Things explores it sounds as if inconsequential gadgets in well known Victorian texts to make touch with their fugitive meanings. constructing an leading edge method of examining nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood the following reconnects the issues readers unwittingly forget about to the tales they tell.

Building her case round gadgets from 3 recognized Victorian novels—the mahogany furnishings in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations—Freedgood argues that these items are hooked up to histories that the novels slightly recognize, producing darker meanings outdoors the novels’ symbolic platforms. A important contribution to the recent box of item stories within the humanities, The principles in Things pushes readers’ pondering issues past tested thoughts of commodity and fetish.

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